The floor fell out of John Flora’s world when his foot nearly snapped in half running a simple cone drill. But the worst was still to come, when he was covered in vomit and wondering how it all went wrong.

“The lowest point of my life,” Flora said. “Then it all slowly started coming together.”

As football bridges from the college bowl season to the NFL draft this spring, the names of hundreds of young players will surface as potential stars. Only a few will find that glory. Some will fall just shy of an NFL roster. Nearly all of them will suffer in some way. How they make it through those transitions out of college will largely fall on finding a place to belong.

Flora was a standout high school linebacker in Denver’s suburbs and a large-and-in-charge defensive lineman at Wyoming before he arrived at the threshold of the NFL. He always carried an overflowing passion for football that almost seemed sentimental. But he had the physical gifts for a real shot at the professional ranks.

Then his dream ended in a snap. In front of NFL scouts, at a pro-day tryout in 2006 that he hoped would prove his next-level ability, Flora suffered a broken foot running a noncontact “L drill” pivoting around orange cones.

“And that’s when hell happened,” said Flora, now 34.

Football is America’s most unforgiving major sport, a game cluttered with the discarded bodies of once-promising young players who break down physically. Most football careers never come to a convenient end, but the players forced to leave because of injuries are especially vulnerable, torn away from a game they love on a timetable they never envisioned.

What Flora finally figured out, through three years of misery, changed his life. Football never left him. It beat him down and twisted his emotions. But he didn’t need to withdraw from the game. The problem was his.

Football nearly killed him — but it also helped saved his life.

“Swept under the carpet”

Flora’s sacrifices took him to the fringe of the NFL. He was trying to be one of the few dozen players every year who sign as undrafted rookies. The Indianapolis Colts flew scouts to Laramie for a private workout with him and three other Wyoming players.

“I felt good that day,” Flora recalled. “I was thinking, ‘This is the next level for me.’ ”

But he never made it to the end of practice. In shorts and tennis shoes, trying to post an impressive time in front of judgmental men with clipboards and stopwatches, he cut around a cone on the War Memorial Stadium turf and snapped his left foot.

“It just popped,” Flora said. His day — his career — was over. Word spread through NFL scouting departments. Cross off “DE FLORA” from the list.

“I got swept under the carpet,” he said. “I went from hearing from a bunch of teams to nothing. It was like, ‘Where’d everyone go?’ That feeling is gut-wrenching.”

The three other Wyoming players at that NFL tryout soon signed contracts: quarterback Corey Bramlet with the New England Patriots, wide receiver Jovon Bouknight with the Carolina Panthers and safety Derrick Martin with the Baltimore Ravens, who played eight seasons in the NFL.

Flora instead headed to a hospital. Surgeons jammed screws into his foot to hold it together. They prescribed him heavy doses of pain medication. His recovery turned into a long struggle, with nothing waiting for him at the end.

“You spend years and years training and all I wanted was an opportunity. And then — done,” he said.

Only about 3 percent of Colorado high school football players are recruited by Division I college programs, let alone ever play for one. Flora was one of them, and he always played through pain.

He suffered a concussion as a sophomore in high school. He suffered a torn ligament in his right knee as a senior. Another concussion playing basketball. He redshirted as a freshman at Wyoming because of a lingering stress fracture, and he suffered a concussion before his sophomore year. But he played every game over his final three seasons with the Cowboys.

“I would downplay it with doctors,” he said of a string of nagging injuries. “I’d say, ‘Oh, I just tweaked something.’ I never wanted to miss anything. I had a dream of going to the next level.”

By 2004, Flora was an oversized defensive end dominating the Las Vegas Bowl in Wyoming’s upset win over UCLA. At 6-foot-4 and 267 pounds, he helped shut down Bruins running back Maurice Jones-Drew.

Flora was gathering affirmation of his NFL dream. After that standout junior year, he had been named to the all-Mountain West preseason first team. On Wyoming’s depth chart as a senior, he started in front of Mitch Unrein, who went on to play five seasons with the Broncos.

Then, nothing.

“When I realized football was gone,” Flora said, “I just cried. And the only thing that helped was pain pills.”

Trying to not feel the pain

After football was ripped from Flora, heartache consumed him. His purpose vanished — until he discovered a new dedication. “It caught fire,” he said. “My addiction.”

He coasted to a business degree in 2006 but never used it. He was too high on pain medication. He was taking two, three, then four pills at a pop to start. Then 12 in a night. Opiates at first, then benzodiazepines and sleeping pills. Vicodin, Xanax, Ativan.

“I did everything I could to not feel anything,” Flora said.

His addiction wasn’t unique. The New York Times recently described the ongoing opioid epidemic as “the deadliest drug crisis in American history,” with overdoses accounting for 64,000 deaths in 2016, the majority from opiates. Painkillers led to nearly 100 deaths every day last year, “a pace faster than the HIV epidemic at its peak.”

Pain pills are also, specifically, a football problem. A study conducted by Washington University in St. Louis found that NFL players abused opioid medications four times as often as the rest of the U.S. population.

Nothing about Flora seemed to predispose him to addiction — except, perhaps, the one thing that binds successful football players: the requirement to commit in full. All that effort he had put into making himself a college standout and pro prospect he turned toward finding pills.

“His light just switched off,” said Flora’s mother, Pam. “His love of the game disappeared. It was horrible. He saw the end, and that was it. Everything was done, his future was gone. And that’s when the addiction started.”

Flora conned pills from websites in Ecuador. He had dealers in Laramie and Denver. He stole pills from his mother after she underwent double knee surgery. He stole expired pain pills from his grandmother and his aunt. After his girlfriend’s roommate’s dog needed surgery, he stole the pet pills.

Planning to take his life

Long after the pain of a broken foot faded, Flora’s mental torment continued to compound. In the throes of a three-year addiction spiral, he plotted how to kill himself, slowly, with pain pills.

“I had it in my mind, this is how I wanted to die,” he said. “I didn’t want to feel that pain anymore.”

He would spend hours sitting on the floor of a shower with water running over his head, alone and pulsing with shame. “I couldn’t even shave in front of a mirror because I was so disgusted with myself,” he said.

Flora’s parents grew tired of his manipulation and lying. They sent him to a rehabilitation center near Del Ray Beach, just north of Boca Raton, Fla. But his drug haze was so thick, Flora can’t remember how he got there.

Rehab didn’t work, and he lied his way out. Scoring pain pills was easy, and rehab proved to be a great place to meet like-minded drug seekers. One morning, Flora woke up on the beach near a guy who had fallen asleep with a heroin needle in his arm.

Flora’s parents figured out how he was dodging rehab and gave him an ultimatum: Get through detox, do the steps, get a job. If not, they told him, they would call the police and he no longer would be their son.

“As hard as it was on my parents,” Flora said, “if they didn’t let me go, I would have been gone. Because I would have died.”

So he committed, finally in 2008, to detoxing. It took three weeks to withdraw from pain pills. “That was rock bottom, pure hell,” he said. He often woke up covered in his own vomit.

“It was a very dark time for us,” Pam said. “He’s strong, not just physically but mentally. When he puts his mind to something, good or bad, he gets there. We said a lot of prayers. We had to save his life.”

Finding a new purpose

Flora eased back into life with a job at a four-star hotel in 2008. He earned the employee of the year award. But something was missing. He needed football.

The nearest team he could find was Florida Atlantic University, an upstart program coming off its first bowl-game victory in 2007. The Owls were at the time coached by Howard Schnellenberger, the former coach of the Baltimore Colts who won a national championship at the University of Miami.

Flora walked into Schnellenberger’s office overlooking FAU’s practice field, unspooled an honest story of addiction and recovery, and asked for a job, any job.

“When you find a kid who’s having trouble, it’s our responsibility to try to help them work through it,” Schnellenberger said. “As a coach, you have to be a chaplain, a doctor, a coach, everything. You have to help get them through an injury, a drug addiction; maybe they were locked up for something. You have to try to keep them in the loop.”

Flora got an unpaid position doing grunt work helping coach the Owls’ offense through spring practices. There was nothing glamorous about the job. But it was football, a glint of the game that once left him behind.

Then he received a phone call from Brad Pyatt, a former All-Colorado wide receiver two years ahead of Flora at Arvada West who played in the NFL for the Colts. Pyatt had been hired as A-West’s new coach and was putting the band back together. He asked Flora to be his defensive line coach.

“I don’t ever ask my kids ‘Who’s your favorite coach?’ But I can tell you John is one of them,” Pyatt said. “They have nothing but high praise and loyalty for John.”

Flora now starts his job at 3 a.m. working with his brother at the family’s pet food distribution company, then in the fall leaves in time to coach football practice after high school lets out. His days are filled with early mornings and late nights. The Wildcats finished 7-3 this past season and qualified for the Class 5A playoffs for the first time since 2013.

“With football, it’s a relationship that is going to break your heart. You have to accept that,” Pyatt said. “You will come to a bump in the road, more often than not. But you always gravitate back to football because it’s what taught you to be resilient and respond to failure in the first place.”

Reborn into the game

Flora’s lesson to players can be about more than edge pass rushing and the three-point stance. He went from playing college ball on national TV to sleeping on the beach next to other drug addicts.

“If even one kid can hear what I went through, the struggles and the pain, maybe it can help,” he said. “I’ve got that spark back in me. Even though I’m not playing, I’m able to show the kids how to do it right.”

What happens to a player after football finishes demands a rebirth. Some players ease off to another endeavor outside the game. Some spend their lives vainly reliving old glory. Some never find a new purpose.

And some go through hell only to end up right back where they started. Flora suffered more than most. Only his family finally saved him. Both families.

“It took a lot of time to forgive the football gods,” Flora said. “Football is all I ever knew. I thought I could take it to the next level. And in a snap, it was over. I didn’t know how to live life without football.”

He will never again strap on pads and play, even if he thinks he can. But being around the game is enough to fill the void that nearly swallowed him.

“No one should have to hurt people the way I did,” Flora said. “There can be a happy ending.”

After watching Air Force kick the CU Buffaloes’ tail, not to mention their undefeated record, into the wild, blue yonder, here’s a legitimate question: How in the world is the Pac-12 recognized as a Power Five football conference?